Why Teaching History is Important
No one argues about if kids should learn reading. In math, despite all the debates about the type of math that should be taught, no one questions the value of teaching the subject itself.
But history seems to be a waste of valuable teaching time in this information rich era.
If I want to know the date of a war or a leader of China in a certain time of history, all I have to do is look it up on my phone, computer or even ask a virtual assistant nearby.
So if facts are so easy to look up, why teach history at all?
History’s true value lies in how we apply the lessons from the past to our present and our future.
As far as I’m concerned, all history tests should be open book or open computer for the facts portion. But it should also include some deep essay questions, because the application of history is really what we want the students to walk away knowing at the end of the day.
History, as I see it, can really be boiled down to three main areas: significant historical figures, how communities responded to these figures, and sweeping cultural changes.
Historical Figures
There are many people in the past who have made their mark on history. Some are remembered for their good and some for their bad, but every time period we study has the main people who were significant for that slice of time.
I think history, as a general rule, should be taught less one sided. People are not perfect, nor are they pure evil.
Take Hitler for example. He is probably the most vilified person in history. And, to be clear, I do think what he did was wrong, and definitely unacceptable.
But he needs to be taught in context.
Eugenics, and the idea of breeding a better race is not just a German evil. According to at least one documentary, Hitler was inspired by… the United States Eugenic Program.
The Americans, not the Germans, led the way with laws passed to sterilize those considered unfit, including immigrants, Jews, African-Americans, mentally ill and moral delinquents.
As the idea of heredity was catching on, and people were learning that you are who you are because of those whose genes you carry, it was a natural step to think of what genes you wouldn’t want to continue. Unfortunately, in a time that many races and minority groups were treated unfairly, people thought this was as good of reason as any to limit the population of these “lesser” groups.
So if you look at Hitler’s motives, they were not radically worse than what many people believed at the time, which is partly why so many people followed him and his ideals. It made sense to them to make Germany better, and eugenics taught you could do that by cleaning up the bloodlines.
If I was teaching about Hitler to a group of students, I would be sure to put him in context. The date that he rose to power is less important than why he rose to power. The questions that I would raise in a discussion, and ask on tests would be:
Why did people follow him? Why didn’t anyone stop him?
More importantly, what do you think people should have noticed?
What would it take for you to decide not to follow a leader that your neighborhood supported?
What would it take for you to not follow a leader, that you suspected was not right, even at the risk of your own family’s safety?
The heroes of history were not one sided either.
I appreciate Hamilton the musical for keeping Alexander Hamilton’s faults in the musical, as well as praising his accomplishments. Lin Manuel Miranda also successfully portrayed George Washington as someone who needed support, who got angry, and who didn’t necessarily make all of the right choices.
A proper history curriculum starts with showing the important historical figures as people, imperfect, flawed and not black or white, good or evil. Even those who we can clearly point to as the ones who made the wrong choices usually had their own logic for why it wasn’t evil.
See, that’s the thing I most want the upcoming voting citizens to know. While historians may debate about the qualities of important historical people after they are gone, for people living through it, it isn’t so easy to know who to follow or what to do. It is up to us, this generation and the next, to make our best guesses about the people we vote for, based on the facts available to us, and seeing through their words to find the truth for ourselves.
It is easy to look back and judge the German population, but many of them thought that Hitler and the American Eugenics program had good points, so they went along with it.
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